DIGGER
2026
Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu
Written by Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolás Giacobone, Sabina Berman, and Alejandro González Iñárritu
Spoilers: not that I'd say so myself, but if one wished to discuss the film in any meaningful way whatsoever, apparently "high"
Digger was announced to the world a few months ago in the form of one of the most God-damnedly off-putting trailers I have ever personally seen, a clipshow designed—I suppose not, for these purposes, too terribly—as a celebration of the storied acting career of Thomas Cruise Mapother IV,* also a producer here, and even as a fairly inveterate fan of Tom Cruise's acting career myself, I was nauseated by the intense self-regard of it as I would be at any act of such self-regard, while also amused at the miscalculation of it, given that, "fandom" or not, Cruise is widely despised as a human being and even his hits of the last decade or so, mostly in his Missions: Impossible, have implicitly banked on the bad man taking all manner of physical punishment for your entertainment. The trailer did pose a salient question: what the fuck does the acting career of Tom Cruise have to with Digger, a film that, so far as could be determined from that trailer and from later trailers and from subsequent research, was about a cartoon fossil fuel executive destroying and/or saving the planet from a crisis of his own making?
The long answer is that Digger, a film directed and co-written by Alejandro González Iñárritu, involves a substantial degree of metafiction, which has been framed as a twist (and the metafictional branch of its narrative does involve an actual twist that I'm not going to outright spoil), and while "being metafictional" is perhaps not the most heartstopping surprise from this filmmaker, and I imagine that you or I could've cut a trailer that didn't give this away but still just, you know, used footage from the actual movie our bosses wanted people to come see (other trailers, in fact, did so), this clipshow of often-great and frankly mostly-better Cruise movies does, if you squint really hard, point somewhere in the general direction of Digger's ideas. The short answer, meanwhile, is "nothing": at a maximum, the film is simply a reminder that the formerly stunt-forward sexagenarian is a legitimate actor of much experience and craft. The particular shape of the metafictional conceit, revealed about thirty minutes in, turns out to be that the events that are still going to constitute the significant majority of Digger are the technical rehearsals for and eventually the opening night of a play—the play is actually called Fossil Fools—in other words, a medium that Cruise last had contact with, as far as I can tell, in high school. Cruise's character, Curtis Markson, is married to a woman who seems to basically like him and has a daughter he cares about. Maybe that's the gag.
It is a little bit like Birdman, obviously, except that had at least a resonance in its star/character juxtaposition, and that movie makes for such a damning comparison against this one I don't think it's good to even think of it; it's more like somebody tried to make a Wes Anderson film and didn't know how. The play-within-the-play, meanwhile, has its moments; that's like if somebody tried to make a Stanley Kubrick film with pronounced Roland Emmerich & Dean Devlin characteristics, a sort of Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Catastrophic Climate Change), and barely knew how,** and not enough to keep a film that has almost no actual disaster film spectacle, despite being a disaster film, from nevertheless ballooning up to a gobsmacking $120 million, going by the low estimates, thereby inflicting upon what is fundamentally a lightly-alienating art film a desperate need to hit blockbuster opening weekend numbers and ensuring that Warners' quixotic marketers would try to sell it the way it got sold, even though their efforts were probably counterproductive and losing about $100 million was pretty much baked in long before they sent the licensing requests out. ("Show me the money" sure takes on a new valence.)
So: we meet the morning sun at a palatially-kitschy country estate with a certain Digger (it is never clear if this is a sobriquet but it actually is probably his given name) Rockwell (Cruise, duh), who is confronted with two crises as soon as he wakes up, one being another manifestation of the failing health of his dying cat Maggie, and the other being a giant crack in the Greenland ice sheet caused by his oil and natural gas exploration; I have listed them in order of Digger's own priority, though it probably wouldn't have mattered at this point if he'd reversed them, because moments after he finishes blustering an on-site subordinate into a quivering lump of inaction, Greenland more-or-less blows up, cleaving an enormous berg off the ice sheet and into the Arctic, where currents may take it into the Atlantic where it'll melt or into the North Sea where it will collide with the Norwegian coast and cause tsunamis wrecking Western Europe. (I'm dubious about the science here—the displacement would be triggered immediately, and the effect would be predominantly local—though this would be far from important in your Emmerich & Devlin disaster flick, so it oughtn't be important here.) Digger mobilizes the U.S. government, personified in failing, ass-cancer ridden President Compson (John Goodman), and sets to work, partly the work of averting or mitigating the disaster with his scientist, Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), and his sister, green energy CEO Emma Rockwell (Sandra Hüller), and mostly the work of controlling the narrative of the evolving mass-death. Behind the scenes, Markson is having artistic conflicts with his director (Sophie Wilde) and fending off gladhanding attempts by his producer (Jesse Plemons) while also dealing with a personal crisis when his daughter's plane goes missing.
Let's backload the meta content, though it could be worthwhile to initially observe that it might be taking time away from Fossil Fools as an integral and cogent story of its own. Not that I reckon that to have been the guiding principle here, anyway; the principal thrust of Digger is its characterization of elites, particularly carbon-spewing, climate change-denying elites but the analogies are easily drawn, as venal morons, a thesis ultimately summed up in the play-without-the-play in the midst of its own strongest turn, as Markson grapples with what he perceives to be the unreality of the anti-capitalist cartoon as rendered on the page, basically coming around to the truth that they really are that stupid even if the sheer fact of their power makes them more frightening than funny. Frankly, I don't know if it actually hits the contemporary target on that latter count: Digger is as strongly suggestive as anything I've seen lately of the prospect that you can't really do satire anymore. It's out-of-date in many regards—to be fair, I think this is more deliberate than otherwise—and boasts a collection of caricatures from another age, not just in terms of a gerontocracy (a concept openly invoked by the script) but that other age's gerontocracy. Thus Digger is a drawling robberbaron, not some conman geek; he's reckless with the lives of billions, but he's not delusionally psychotic; he is a producer of a useful product, which puts him well afield of capitalism's contemporary chieftains already, and though he be tyrannical, he thinks of himself as a king, with some idiosyncratically-defined obligation to his kingdom if rarely to his individual subjects, rather than an out-and-out godling. For his part, Compson, a personification of Evangelical Christianity, though he eventually looses himself from even those minimally-humbling bonds, could have been written precisely as he is forty or fifty years ago, and so naturally has been many, many times. Hell, with Goodman, it's almost typecasting (and I do not like, though of course this is no knock on the film, how believably sickly old Goodman's looking here). And, it occurs to me, we've now run out of characters who do anything. But shall we compare this to our real-life oil-related crisis? Because we'll only frown realizing that at no point in Digger does its rogues gallery of world-ending villains perpetuate their crisis as a murderous insider trading scheme.
I suppose this sounds like complaining, but honestly I mostly appreciate this and that effort has been expended to not just make it a Trump Era film, with lazy impressionism doing the job of jokes, and I tend to wish it were pushed harder beyond its initial concept: if I can refer to extrinsic material of even less connection to the movie itself than the trailer, consider all that banner artwork that's such a creature of the early 60s, maybe just because of Goddamn Strangelove, but puts you in mind of a wacky megacomedy of that period (Strangelove isn't normally categorized this way, but it kind of is that), and in this the later trailers did help. It pursues this sometimes: whatever Markson's objections to it might be, I'd say that Tom Cruise playing Yosemite Sam across the length and breadth of an irresponsibility-driven satire of capitalism is a pretty good hook, and he's clearly good at it—even if, without imagination put into it, Cruise's performance is going to start getting repetitive even before reality topples over and he's somebody else instead—but there is, at least, a great deal of potential there.
Digger's unreasoning, counterproductive adoration of his cat seems perfectly designed for this—besides being a metaphor, I guess, she is the major handhold for a "relatability" to this character, even if in practice she's mainly another way he irresponsibly/humorously overweens people—and Cruise and "Maggie" are by a pretty wide margin the single most reliable source of comedy in this comedy, the latter benefiting from an animatronic that almost seems broken, and nobody has to actually be very ginger with, but then the joke is that the puppet doesn't have to pretend to be more than very vaguely alive and, as Emma notes, should probably be destroyed for its own and everyone else's good. That seems like dark, nasty-minded fun: a capitalist and his cat go on an adventure. Unless I missed it when I went to the bathroom, the cat dies, offscreen, less than an hour in; I'm fairly confident I did not miss it, because this absent scene is the subject of an involved dialogue that details everything that happened in it. Oh well.
This is in keeping with the movie generally, including Iñárritu's employment of Emmanuel Lubezki, a cinematographer presumably chosen more because the director likes working with him than because he ever becomes a value-add to this particular project, in conjunction with the belligerent chilly beige of the art direction sucking all possible fun and feeling out of the imagery, without even exploiting any of the flamboyant pyrotechnics—I said I wouldn't mention it again, but it is germane—of Birdman, or The Revenant. So there was no recommendation for this reteaming there, either, and if the shot design and editing is very frequently baffling as how this could possibly read as "a play"—I think the one time it seriously bothers is the scene right after that reveal, that leaps the action ahead to Europe's doom (we watch the ensemble's reactions to the destruction rather than the destruction itself), and it's just irritatingly proscenium-based—this would probably bother me less in a movie, or play, or whatever, whose diegesis distracted me from it more.
A bit past the halfway point, Digger digs up a new approach that could start powering the movie, at least as a propaganda piece, but as a comedy and, for that matter, a Cruise starring vehicle, inasmuch as while Digger himself might be an effects makeup-boosted sack of old pallid flesh, he's being portrayed by the spryest old man in Hollywood, who's been pumping theatrical, campy energy into the character the whole time without much outlet for it; this arrives at Digger's address to the assembled leaders of Europe, where, inspired by Ganesh's example, he lays into them (i.e., us) with brutal honesty, and for a spell the movie becomes Bulworth with fossil fuels—and, potentially, comedic action sequences; and the most successful usage of stagecraft in this movie about stagecraft—and it is awfully tantalizing, though it's not a mode the movie really occupies beyond just this scene. Before this and after this, it's going to ape the structure of a disaster film, and its sole engagement with that genre is that "they're dumb," which in combination with this being "a play" (oh, now it matters) means it isn't even interested in generating thrills out of its Armageddon-with-and-iceberg plot, or even filling in the details, which means laughs in this phase are extremely theoretical and it probably winds up the most hectoring material in a film that would have to go out of its way, and obviously doesn't, to avoid being a little hectoring. Ultimately, the movie is more "like" a play, in a somewhat pejorative sense: other than delivering on its overarching idea, it exists mainly to serve as a container for three pretty great soliloquies—I've mentioned Cruise's outstanding centerpiece, and Goodman gets another one, to declare himself messiah—though maybe it should be sort of nettling that the third one comes outside of the play.
If I've been saying so far that the play-without-the-play does little except take away from the movie, then your impression would be—broadly—correct. On a very basic level, it lets the screenplay not give as much of a shit as it should about the story that occupies 80% of the film's runtime, and the leave it affords for plot discontinuities or to not show stuff in the manner natural to a motion picture (as inconsistent as it is about this) is annoying and disruptive. (That some of the imagery Iñárritu clearly wanted depends very much on stagelike effects seems like a feeble excuse; only a coward needs a reason for an affrontively antirealist gesture.) And somehow it still runs afoul of a "such small portions" problem: there's no way for "actually, it's a fucking play" to not be hugely important, and reorienting of our attentions and our understanding of the movie towards its higher narrative layer, and, like, does "Curtis Markson" have a story? That is, besides making complaints about a play that later revelations will indicate are pretty belated to be making long after you signed up for the role, akin to going up to your Rocky Horror director and asking, "But why is this so gay?"
But then, while I'm unpersuaded there wasn't a much more efficient way to get to it, without the play we don't get that overarching idea I mentioned and the overarching idea is really good, if not amenable to being explored much further the way Digger is doing it, and possibly not that amenable to being explored at all. (It's unfortunate that the third act of the play itself is dead-ish air, though the ending, while only visually confirming what we already learned before we returned to that third act, has some wallop to it.) And, yes, this would be a spoiler—it's always a pity when the best part of a movie is a spoiler; it actually shouldn't be, if you're paying attention, but whatever else the movie is very effectively distracting you from it—so if I may attempt to write around it, suffice it to say that Digger's argument about our times is extremely vicious and sad, basically boiling down to the proposition that future generations might be scared we'll kill them, and we're not even scared they'll laugh at us. Maybe you had to be there, though, because I'd have liked to have laughed more.
Score: 6/10
*Jesus Christ, no kidding?
**So what it might be most like is Don't Look Up, except Cruise is a promise of basically good movies and Leonardo DiCaprio, since his one collaboration with this filmmaker eleven years ago, in fact, has been exclusively a guarantor of bad ones.
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